Admiral Canaris - Chief of Intelligence , livre ebook

CHIEF OF INTELLIGENCE
by
IAN COLVIN
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Ian Colvin
Ian Duncan Colvin was born on 29 th September 1877 in Scotland, and has become well known as a popular journalist and historian.
Between 1903 and 1907, Colvin worked as an assistant editor of the Cape Times in South Africa, as well as penning several satirical poems, most notably The Parliament of Beasts (1905). Colvin was fascinated by South Africa, and published several books about the country and its people on his return to England; South Africa in 1909 and The Cape of Adventure in 1912. In addition to writing these historical texts, he soon worked his way up the journalistic ladder, and from 1909, Colvin worked as a leader writer for The Morning Post , (a conservative daily newspaper published in London from 1772 to 1937). In 1915 he returned to historical works, and published The Germans in England, 1066-1598 , a text which demonstrated how the Hanseatic League had attempted to gain control of Europe through a combination of peaceful and violent methods. The Hanseatic League was a commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and market towns that dominated trade along the coast of Northern Europe, and by the end of the reign of Edward IV (1483), their influence in England was substantial. This continued until the Tudor monarchy expelled almost all of the German merchants in the country. Colvin saw strong parallels between the German reach for world power in the medieval period with the contemporary political situation - i.e. the First World War, and British attempts to expel or confine much of the German population.
After the enormous success of this work, in 1929, Colvin continued with his factual writing, and composed a biography of General Reginald Dyer; a British Indian Army officer who, as a temporary Brigadier general, was responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar. Colvin died on 10 th May, 1938, at the age of sixty.
To
H. C. O N EILL
ADMIRAL CANARIS
FOREWORD
THE INTELLIGENCE GAME
H OW GOOD WAS the British Intelligence Service during the Second World War? Did it compare with the legendary reputation of the Secret Service in the past? Did we out-man uvre the German Abwehr? Did we know what country Hitler intended to attack, and when? It seemed that at the beginning of the war the British Government was surprised by a series of unexpected aggressions.
I was casting these questions over one of the Under-Secretaries of State at lunch when the German wars were over and he rose to the subject, remarking with a certain emphasis:
Well, our Intelligence was not badly equipped. As you know, we had Admiral Canaris, and that was a considerable thing.
Hitler s Intelligence Chief a British agent? Although I had occasion over a number of years, as a correspondent of British newspapers in Berlin, to catch glimpses of the workings of the Chief of Intelligence Services of the German Armed Forces, it would have no more occurred to me to describe him as a British agent than I would have described Tallyrand as an agent of Castlereagh. Yet the Under-Secretary said we had Canaris emphatically, and his point of view was so fascinating that I have begun this study of Canaris by quoting it.
As I walked away from lunch that day it seemed that this must be the best-kept secret of the war. I wondered to what extent the Services Information and News Departments, usually so helpful in historical research, would respond to enquiries about Admiral Canaris.
You have chosen a difficult subject for us, said Brigadier Lionel Cross at the War Office. Why not ask the Admiralty? After all, he was a sailor. At length I found an officer in the Admiralty who had made a study of Canaris. I am afraid I cannot help you much on the aspect which interests you, he admitted, and I don t think anyone can. I tried the Foreign Office.
We have a large amount of material on Admiral Canaris-all of it secret, said the Foreign Office. We could not contemplate allowing you to examine it yourself, and we cannot spare the time of anyone here to look through these papers for you.
But, I objected, historians are given access to a great number of documents of recent date.
We see your point, but we don t see our way to help you.
Was it so deep a mystery? I asked Lord Vansittart if he could say anything of Canaris as a friend of the British. I only knew of him as an efficient intelligence officer, he answered.
By chance I met a man at lunch who had worked in the Military Secretary s office of the War Office during the war. We fell to talking about the German enigma and I once again mentioned Canaris. The name registered.
Ah yes, said the man from the War Office, he helped us all he could, didn t he? I said I thought that this was so. What has become of him? my companion asked.
So the search for Admiral Canaris went on; Germans in remote villages, Austrians, Irishmen, Spaniards, Poles, Swiss, each with a scrap of information to add to the strange portrait of the man who was Hitler s Intelligence Chief and Britain s secret contact in Germany. I had before the war collected certain information when working as foreign correspondent of the News Chronicle in Berlin. As correspondent of Kemsley Newspapers in Germany since the war, I have been able to add to that material. The German biography of Canaris by Dr. Karl Abshagen has also given me the broad trend of his career and I am indebted to its author.
Members of the German Abwehr have helped me with their own aspects of the story: General Erwin Lahousen, long his assistant and head of Branch II, Dr. Paul Leverkuehn, his chief in Turkey, Dr. Josef Mueller, special liaison man with the Vatican. Close personal friends of Canaris have helped, too, like Otto John, who worked for him in Portugal, and Fabian von Schlabrendorff, who was entrusted by him with high political secrets.
I expected to be writing this book without any official assistance from the British and had already finished many chapters when the telephone in my office rang, and I realised with some astonishment that someone on our own side had a word or two to say about Canaris. The British Secret Service looked further into the mind of Admiral Canaris than his close German associates were aware. Some of his old British opponents in the duel of wits have helped to correct imperfections in my portrait with a solicitous and friendly touch.
The main records of the Admiral s secret activities, his diary, may have been destroyed by the Gestapo, but there is no conclusive evidence that it may not come to light when the prisons are emptied of the remnants of the Nazis and the world has quietened down. Therefore I have not attempted a full biography of Canaris or even a verdict on his strange character.
The intricate collecting of technical information and the networks of agents and large departments that flourish in the intelligence game are the backcloth, but not the main interest of this book. How we deceived the enemy and rooted out his agents in Britain is a chapter that may be told in the fullness of time. It is the mentality of the man himself, and the web that he wove round Hitler, that seize the imagination. The readers will have to judge for themselves whether Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was a German patriot or a British spy, a European statesman or a cosmopolitan intriguer, a double agent, an opportunist or a seer. It will not be easy for them to make up their minds.
I started the story with my ideas still disordered; then I undertook a journey to Spain and scoured south Germany for the remnants of his Intelligence Service. This was not sufficient-Berlin and the northern provinces had to be reconnoitred. Still the picture blurred and altered. Every German officer I met put a little more into the portrait, but each was sceptical about the lines that his colleague had drawn. That can t be true-or the Admiral would certainly have told me about it. How often was I to hear that answer! How often I saw their faces cloud with suspicion that their own idea of him was incomplete!
Eventually when I had visited Madrid, Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Wiesbaden, Munich, Stuttgart, somebody in England who appeared to know more than a little about my subject suggested that I should visit a remote village in Holstein. Go and see Richard Protze, he said; you cannot finish your book without him. Who was he? The Admiral s mate when he was a young submarine officer, later by odd coincidence his Chief of Counter-Espionage. I found him at the back of beyond on the Baltic coast, a heavy, white-haired old man with pale-blue eyes that fixed your attention for as long as he cared to relate and had strength to tell the story. Gaps-there will always be gaps, he said, and he wound back his mind to the time when this intelligence game began, and held me with the eye of the ancient mariner.
We in England hardly know his name, I said. Yet some people tell me that he spoiled Hitler s destiny.
The Germans did not know his name until the end of the war, he said, because he was the Chief of Military Intelligence. Anyone who knew his name and mentioned it openly would be sentenced to imprisonment.
He was an officer of the German Navy who served in the General Staff and later in the High Command-but he was not really an officer by nature-a politician rather.
A politician without a name, I suggested.
Yes, if you like, and so the story began.
CONTENTS
Foreword: The Intelligence Game
Chapter I.